As well as a Robots.txt file, you may have also heard of meta robots and x-robots and were wondering what the differences between them are.

Firstly, Robots.txt is an actual text file that is standalone, while meta robots and x-robots are meta directives that are located on specific pages.

The main difference between them is that Robots.txt defines site-wide or directory-wide crawl behavior (including specific pages), while meta robots and x-robots indicate indexation behavior only at the page level.

More specifically, the differences between meta robots and x-robots are as follows:

Meta Robots is an HTML meta tag that is placed within the head section of individual web pages. It allows you to specify page-specific directives for web crawlers, such as "noindex" to prevent a specific page from being indexed or "nofollow" to instruct crawlers not to follow links on that page. Meta Robots provides more granular control compared to Robots.txt.

X-Robots is an HTTP header that can be set at the server level or for specific web pages. It offers similar capabilities to Meta Robots but is typically used for advanced scenarios. X-Robots allows you to control how content is indexed and displayed, including specifying canonical URLs, setting page-specific "noindex" directives, or limiting image indexing. It's more flexible and powerful but may require more technical expertise to implement.